The Dawn of Sin

by Grassetti, Valentino

  “Paolo Magnoli promised he would never see Nicole again. A handshake between civilized people. On the more beautiful one, Salieri, as quick as a snake, pulls a syringe full of barbiturates from his coat pocket. Zac! An induced coma, quick and painless. It took him an hour to hang your husband from an oak tree branch. It wasn't very original to simulate an injury. But it had worked. No one ever thought of murder.”

  "Daisy, give me the phone” Sandra said, completely ignoring Adriano's story.

  “You never suspected anything, pretty lady?”

  "That's enough of this bullshit Adriano!" cried Sandra, losing patience.

  “You still don't get it? I'm not your son, you bitch!”

  "I have to go... warn someone” Sandra exclaimed, raising her hands, the feeling of being plunged into an endless nightmare. The woman grabbed her blue coat and put it on the back of the chair. She looked for the car keys in her bag. She grabbed a bunch from the bottom, but they were the house keys. "The keys, Daisy. You took them. Give me the keys!" she shouted.

  Daisy didn't answer. Sandra lifted her head out of the bag; Daisy and Adriano were no longer in the living room.

  She heard the door thud, followed by the sudden turning of the key in the keyhole.

  Sandra ran to the door. She grabbed the handle. The door was locked.

  She heard the engine of her car, and the squeal of the tires on the pavement.

  Sandra, overwhelmed by a nerve-racking sense of helplessness, pressed her shoulders against the door and

  slipped to the ground, leaving herself exhausted and with an absent gaze, staring into the void.

  From an edge Chicco appeared. It had disappeared since Daisy had come home. The animal rubbed the grey hair on the woman's knees. Sandra caressed the cat's soft, purring head.

  Her nerves gave out, and Sandra started crying her eyes out.

  23

  The Pegasus cooperative occupied three buildings in one cottage.

  Around it, three hectares were torn from the river, reclaimed at least a century before, when the plain was a swamp and farmers died like flies from malaria. Mother Cecilia ran the cooperative, where a dozen or so young people with disabilities worked.

  The young people mostly tried their hand at small craft activities such as embroidery, painting on canvas, ceramics, or the more fun and less demanding decoupage.

  People with less severe disabilities were responsible for the garden and packaging of organic produce. Fresh seasonal fruit and vegetables were processed into tasty jams that could be bought at the cooperative's store.

  The small nun with the sharp mouse nose, the unusually large spectacle frame, got the boys into the yellow van, a Ford Transit equipped to transport the disabled.

  Marisa, the other volunteer, was unavailable for a problem she hadn't wanted to talk about, and Guido offered to accompany the boys on the river trip.

  When he introduced himself to Sister Cecilia, it only took a moment to realize they wasn't right each other. When he reached out to her, the nun didn't shake her hand, preferring to hold the rosary between her arthritic fingers. She merely squared it behind the thick lenses of her glasses, which reflected two huge, black, inquisitive pupils. It seemed to Guido that the nun had something superb, an excess that seemed indisponsive to him. Though she was a tiny woman, she was looking down on him from the top down, with the haughtiness to be her heel.

  "This is Guido” Catherine said, introducing him to the boys.

  "Hello!" The boy waved a hand in greeting.

  "Hello Guido” replied some young men, while those unable to pronounce his name gave him a smile full of enthusiasm.

  Everyone was happy to have Caterina's boyfriend driving the van.

  "Ready for the ride along the river?" said the girl pushing Piero's pram over the flatbed of the van. The young man, black in hair but white as if in need of sunshine, had been a paraplegic since the age of sixteen. His father had been a decent motocross driver. An ambitious amateur who wished his son a professional future. A dream that shattered on the ground bump of a training track. The bike jumped too high, and when it landed, the front fork hit the ground. Piero was thrown off, breaking his neck. He was now 28 years old and could only move his mouth and turn his eyes, especially to stare at the girls'. Despite everything, Piero was surprisingly in love with life.

  The last one to get into the van was Onofrio, a boy of almost six feet, very curved on his shoulders and with an unusually pronounced goiter. He suffered from a severe intellectual deficit, but his smile was an unsettling humanity.

  Catherine sat next to Guido, who sat in the driver's seat, concentrating on studying the levers of the controls.

  Sister Cecilia closed the sliding door and sat in the center row. Serena, a round-faced Down girl, immediately began courting her new companion.

  Guido started the van, taking the long gravel road through the ploughed fields, where the damp clods were cut by the steel blades of a powerful ploughing machine.

  Serena, most excited by Guido's presence, began asking him questions about sex. She was immediately silenced by the nun, who promptly grabbed the rosary and threatened the little girl with the Lord's Prayer.

  Serena answered her with a resounding "fuck you" that made everyone laugh.

  The van drove along the gravel path, raising a trail of dust, whitewashing the scrubs that grew uncultivated on the roadbed.

  Catherine watched thoughtfully as the straight, unbroken road, where the dense rows of almond trees on either side of the path joined in a dot on the horizon.

  "My boys are wonderful, Guido” she told him frankly, "but you shouldn't use them. Just as you shouldn't use me."

  "Excuse me? I don't think I understand” exclaimed Guido, the voice that revealed a pointless theatrical note.

  "You are not here for me. Nor are you here for them” the girl calmly repeated.

  "I don't follow you” he said in a low voice, his eyes pointing to the rear-view mirror, hoping the nun was not eavesdropping.

  "I'm good at chemistry, Guido” she continued, staring at the dust raised by the imposing tires of a tractor going in the opposite direction.

  Guido watched Catherine in trellis, without losing sight of the gravel road.

  "Chemistry? What does chemistry have to do with it?" he exclaimed surprised.

  "The carbon particulate..." she replied with a deep sigh, "I know exactly what it is: unburned carbon dust. Each particle is only a few nanometres large. On the night of the earthquake, it rained coal. Pieces of coal the size of stones. Something that can't be explained by a lie."

  Catherine paused, giving him time for an explanation that would be credible.

  Guido knew her well and knew that, apart from objective reality, she believed in invisible things. Yes, Catherine was a believer. And faith, after all, was this: to see what is there where the senses could not reach.

  "I'll explain everything to you" he answered uncertainly.

  "No. There's no need” she whispered, shaking her head.

  "Anyway, I'm not using you” he explained very quietly. "Listen, Catherine, I love you. I love you and I would give my life for you. But there's one thing, one thing that's hard to understand. Above all, impossible to explain."

  "And I don't want to know. That's why I pray. I pray all the time."

  "I will tell you everything. But not now” whispered Guido as he looked in the rear-view mirror. Sister Cecilia was staring silently at him, her thin lips tightened in a suspicious crease.

  Behind them, Serena leaned out of her seat to point out two thriving cows with milk-filled udders. They were being pushed along the road by a hard-skinned, dark-skinned farmer.

  Guido grabbed the gear knob to shift into gear, driving the van at a man's pace so as not to frighten the cows.

  They passed a low, flat-roofed barn, mustard-colored walls closed by a row of wooden doors, the stinging smell of hay coming down the path.

  A young man in a worn-out overalls, his green
rubber boots dirty with mud, kicked open the fence door. Guido saw him push out two more cows. Unlike the old man who had crossed over just before, the boy was quite nervous, and not very adept at getting the animals out of the gates. The cows themselves didn't seem to be used to leaving the stable, but they were patient, tolerant, and somehow helping the boy to be guided along the road. Inside the van, the boys watched the meekly-eyed beasts move their tails to chase away a cloud of imaginary flies. Everyone in the choir sang a moo, clapping their hands on the windows to incite the response of the cows.

  A little further on, there was a cattle truck. More men and other animals to load onto the truck.

  Guido had the feeling that the farmers were leaving the area.

  The truck left the gravel road to take the convenient provincial road, continuing the journey at a more sustained

  pace. After a handful of minutes, it turned back onto a path that crossed the fields.

  "Here we are” exclaimed Catherine, pointing her finger over a thick line of fir trees lined up as grenadiers to defend the monastery.

  Guido parked the van near the entrance.

  The high sun made the pink marble rose window of the facade shine, accentuating the details. It reminded Guido of a huge doily embroidered on the stone. Behind it, the lapis lazuli, cobalt blue, indigo and sapphire colours of the stained-glass window. Pieces of coloured glass that seemed to live in their own light. The seatbelt came undone. Before coming down, he felt overwhelmed by the need to take a weight off his heart.

  "I must tell you. I'm here for the manuscript they stole from us” he confessed. "I am convinced the monks have taken it."

  Catherine threw a glance behind his back, hoping that the nun had not heard.

  "The manuscript is not that important” she said. "The only thing that really matters is that you can find all the answers you need."

  "Guido's not well. Not at all."

  "He's just stressed."

  "I don't know if I believe him."

  "Filippa, what do you think?"

  Filippa nodded, as if she wanted to be left alone. She was glued to her computer, focused on finding something no one seemed to know about. Fresh, secret, weird news just enough to start a search. The source was her mother.

  Sister Cecilia, an old haberdashery customer, had mentioned something about the sexton of St. Catervo's church. It seemed that the man had been rushed to the hospital in the past, where the nun went every morning to bless the sick. He

  was interned the night of the accident, when Giovanni Bravi lost his life.

  According to the nun's account, the sexton was praying inside the cathedral when he pierced his side with the sharp tip of a silver crucifix.

  Filippa's mother, from whom her daughter had inherited her intelligence, confided that the nun was usually a taciturn woman. She prayed, and little else. But that day she went into their house, bought a dozen or so spools of black thread that she was selling under the counter after the haberdashery went bankrupt, and, without any real reason to do so, mentioned the sexton.

  The woman had confided to her daughter that the nun, that day, was expressing herself in a strange and severe way, and that she was struck by how the nun was looking at her. As she spoke, the lenses of her glasses had magnified a bad and disturbing light in her eyes, so much so that she interpreted this sinister vision as a warning.

  And Filippa trusted her mother's instinct blindly.

  The girl had begun to do research, surfing the web for a long time, but without success. After a tiring round of phone calls, she had confirmation that something had happened.

  The priest Simone Pietrangeli was a former priest. He left the church after losing his head and his faith behind the explosive curves of a prostitute who was beating wearing a red wig. And nothing else. He was now in the psychiatric ward of Villa Santa Chiara in Verona. A hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy Institute: the same congregation to which Sister Cecilia belonged. A coincidence that did not go unnoticed in Filippa. She focused on the night of the accident: A taxi on fire, a dead man, the taxi driver burned. A few yards away, a junkie who swore he saw Daisy Magnoli burn alive. In the church next door, the sacristan pierced his guts with a crucifix. And, in those very moments, Guido had noticed something falling from the sky. Filippa

  Villa tried to join all the dots of a drawing that escaped her. The more he thought about it, the more logic surrendered to any kind of explanation.

  It was as if her intelligence was stranded against a rock whose nature she was unaware of. A rock that was invisible to everyone.

  ʺBut not Guidoʺ the girl thought.

  "I repeat, he's under stress” Manuel reiterated as he laid out the logo for a line of high quality organic cosmetics products.

  "And he's not telling us the whole truth anyway."

  "I don't know if it's worse than not trusting your friends, or being fooled by them” Leo went on, struggling with an article sent by an outside collaborator. A boring account of a golf competition, a sport that was growing in popularity throughout the region.

  "Filippa? May we know what you think?"

  "Guido is not deceiving us. He's telling the truth."

  "So the monks commissioned the theft of the manuscript. Sounds strange to me."

  "Guido was clear” replied Filippa, although she was concentrating on thinking on a deeper level.

  "That Benedictine” she continued, "Father Romuald, or whatever his name is, has a secular task. He must make all trace of Pardo Melchiorri disappear. That's why he wants to destroy the manuscript. The hypotheticals row."

  "What about everything else? All that nonsense Guido told us?"

  "I can only answer in the words of an ancient philosopher: “Of invisible things and visible things only gods have certain knowledge; men can only make suppositions."

  The landline rang with the timing of a time out.

  "The Union. Tell me."

  Leo listened impatiently, as if it were something of no importance.

  "The cows?" he asked huffing. He looked impatiently at the ceiling, his head nodding to the wall. "Yes, of course. I am listening."

  Manuel asked who he was, but his friend reached out to silence him. The phone call suddenly seemed to have become quite serious.

  Leo, pale in face, thanked him and put the phone down.

  "I mean, who was it?" Filippa asked.

  "A farmer from the hamlet of Poggio."

  "Any bad news?"

  "He says he's part of a consortium of small farmers scattered throughout the valley. It seems that milk production has dropped by sixty percent."

  "Shit. That means the animals are nervous." Filippa became irritated.

  "So what? What does that mean?" Manuel intervened.

  Leo didn't answer. He approached the stained-glass window, the view embracing a slice of the world at the perfect appearance.

  "Not only are the animals nervous. So are men. That's why everyone is leaving the valley.

  24

  Nicole Dubuisson nervously pulled a long, thin cigarette out of a silver case finished in elegant, pure gold plots. The cigarette case was a memento of her father, a French naval admiral who died of pancreatic cancer after sailing the seas for over thirty years.

  Nicole was sitting on the bed, her legs crossed under the folds of her silk petticoat. She watched indifferently her husband who, that day, seemed to be out of his mind.

  "No. He can't do this to me. He can't!" repeated Salieri, sitting in front of the bedroom desk, banging his research notes on the desk top. "Look. Look what he writes to me” he said to his wife, but really only talking to himself. He read the open e-mail on his computer again. He slammed his notes on the table again.

  "I've studied him for years, that boy. He can't do this to me."

  "He's denying you consent. You can't do anything about it” Nicole said, holding a thin jade mouthpiece between her fingers.

  "The publication is ready to go to press. It would be a disaster if
it didn't come out” exclaimed Salieri.

  "That boy knew. He knew about you, and about him. And now he wants revenge."

  "I'm tired of talking about it” Nicole said aloofly.

  For years, the couple had quarrelled over the woman's betrayal, but Salieri was trying for once not to hold it against her. Her disdain was still evident, however, as he held her responsible for Adriano's rejection.

  "I showed my work to the rector of the University of Pavia” he told his wife. "The faculty council will get me the chair through this study. But they want to see it published. Otherwise it's all over."

  Nicole threw a puff of smoke that cracked lightly on the wall.

  "You did things too fast. "And you put yourself on the line financially to buy that cottage, so now get this sorted out as soon as possible. I wouldn't want to end up on the street because of you."

  Salieri didn't like his wife's tone, which seemed unnecessary and inappropriate. He sketched an angry grumble, but he was good at keeping his temper in check. There was no point in arguing. He thought there was only one thing to do.

  "I must speak to Mrs. Magnoli. Sandra will convince Adriano” he said, taking the mobile phone from his trouser pocket. He dialled the number and waited impatiently for the answer, but the phone rang off the hook. He pressed the red end-of-call button.

  Salieri, who felt his wife's annoyance caused by his presence, preferred to leave, leaving her alone in her room.

  "I'll drop by the Magnoli's. I have to sort this out” he said determinedly. After five minutes he was standing in the

  driveway of Sandra's villa. Someone had left the garage door fully raised. He didn't see the Jeep. He didn't think she was home. He was about to leave when, beyond the grate protecting one of the, he saw Sandra waving her hands to get his attention.

  "Mrs. Magnoli. What's going on?" exclaimed Salieri as he got out of the car.

  "The keys. Take the keys. They're under the vase” shaken Sandra, pointing to a thick jasmine with white blossoms.

  Salieri grabbed the vase, moving it a few inches. He took the key and opened the door. Sandra looked pale, the red eyes of those who had cried for a long time.